Motor skill

It has been noted that the fact that the acquisition of manual skill in Korsakoff patients is less impaired than either verbal learning or the solution of puzzles or mazes. This is confirmed in the observation that a severely amnesic patient who had undergone an extensive operation on the temporal lobes could perform rotary-pursuit and tracking tasks at a level not greatly inferior to that of healthy subjects. A second case of the same kind has been described, in which memory for motor tasks such as maze learning or the rendering of new compositions on the piano is said to have been completely preserved. These observations suggest that the acquisition of motor skill may remain relatively unaffected by lesions that give rise to a severe defect of general memory. What is commonly called global or generalized memory defect may, therefore, become increasingly subject to fractionation.

Residual learning capacity

Korsakov himself pointed out that a patient who consistently denies having seen his doctor before does not necessarily react to him on each successive encounter as a total stranger. It thus appears that, despite gross amnesia, some learning, perhaps implicit, can still take place. This view has gained much support from clinical and experimental studies. About 1900 it was reported that even severely affected Korsakoff patients show appreciable savings in relearning verbal material after an interval of several hours or days, thus indicating minimal retention. Some Korsakoff patients, in spite of gross amnesia, eventually learn their way about the hospital. Again, some patients who disown any knowledge of their whereabouts may nevertheless give the correct name of the hospital, when asked to guess or to select it from a list containing the names of several hospitals. Thus, while learning capacity is seldom, if ever, wholly destroyed, there is failure to integrate new knowledge within the total personality. It is apparently a lack of mental cohesion that lies at the basis of Korsakoff’s psychosis.

While some clinicians have attributed memory defect largely to defective registration of experience (i.e., failure to form memory traces), the widely accepted view is that it results primarily from a greatly increased rapidity of forgetting (i.e., rapid decay of memory traces). This view has also been held by the great majority of experimental psychologists who have worked with amnesic people. The consensus is that amnesia sufferers characteristically lose much of the memory they once had. This conclusion finds support in the very rapid extinction of conditioned eyeblink responses to a buzzer. It is notable that, in Korsakoff states, forgetting appears to be due to the passage of time (oblivescence) rather than to retroactive inhibition or some kindred interference effect.

Time disorders

Estimation of time is typically poor in amnesic states. The individual is prone to underestimate grossly the time in which he has been engaged on any particular activity. Conversely, he may equally grossly overestimate the time that has elapsed since a particular event (e.g., the visit of a relative) of which he has preserved some recollection. Indeed, amnesic patients exhibit a remarkable want of coherence in their thought processes, suggesting that a lack of temporal synthesis underlies, and may indeed in large part explain, the defect of memory. Yet although difficulties in dating particular past events and in building a coherent time framework are characteristic of amnesic states and may persist after otherwise good recovery, an explanation couched wholly in terms of time disturbance is scarcely convincing.

Since retrograde amnesia relates to memory for events that took place when brain function was unimpaired, it clearly cannot be ascribed to failure of registration—with the exception, perhaps, of the very brief permanent amnesias following electroconvulsive shock or head injury. Retrograde amnesia otherwise would appear to be wholly due to a failure of retrieval, though this failure is evidently selective. That recent memories are generally harder to evoke than those more remote is usually explained on the basis of consolidation; i.e., progressive strengthening of memory traces with the passage of time. Yet, recency is not the only factor, and in some cases memory for a relatively recent event may still be preserved while that for one more remote is inaccessible. Much depends, too, on the method used to test retrieval; e.g.,recognition may succeed when voluntary recall entirely fails. By and large, the availability of information in memory would seem to depend to a considerable extent on its relation to the person’s current interests and preoccupations. When these are severely curtailed by an amnesic state, the links connecting present and past are severed, with a consequent failure of reproduction.

Psychogenic amnesia

Some forms of amnesia appear to be quite different from those associated with detectable injury or disease of the brain. These comprise, first, amnesias that can be induced in apparently normal individuals by means of suggestion under hypnosis; and secondly, amnesias that arise spontaneously in reaction to acute conflict or stress, and which are commonly called hysterical. Such amnesias are reversible and have been explained wholly in psychological terms. Nevertheless, organic factors are not infrequently involved to some extent, and the distinction between organic and psychogenic amnesia may turn out to be far less absolute than has been supposed.

Hypnotic amnesia

Memory of a hypnotic trance is often vague and fragmentary, as in awakening from an ordinary dream. This may be due in part to defect of registration during the period of altered consciousness. At the same time, very much more complete posthypnotic amnesia can be induced if an individual is told that, when he awakens, he will remember nothing of what went on during the period of hypnosis. This is clearly a psychogenic phenomenon; memory is fully regained if the patient is rehypnotized and an appropriate counter-suggestion given. It may also be regained if the person is persistently interrogated in the waking state, again suggesting that the amnesia is apparent rather than real. This observation led Freud to seek access to ostensibly forgotten (repressed) memories in his patients without the use of hypnosis.

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